The University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and Tula Foundation’s Ocean Decade Collaborative Center for the Northeast Pacific and Quadra Center for Coastal Dialogue hosted a workshop to develop scientific and policy recommendations to help Canada better incorporate the oceans and ocean economic sectors in climate planning and policy both domestically and internationally.
Putting Canada’s Ocean Economy on the Path to Net Zero Emissions brought together a set of experts with representation from various Canadian ocean sectors to share opinions and perspectives to provide support for Canada to bridge this disconnect and harness the ocean and the ocean economy and help achieve netzero emissions. The two-day workshop identified paths to make meaningful contributions to bridge the disconnect between climate policy and ocean-sector policy in Canada including:
• The need for federal government ministries to ensure, enshrine and prioritize Indigenous peoples’ rights to marine harvest, both now and into the future;
• The need to include marine sectors in decarbonization and fuel-switching plans, including both policy carrots (incentives to decarbonize) and sticks (removal of fossil field subsidies to marine industries, clear regulations and timeframes);
• The need for ocean data, regulations of marine economic sectors and policy to be clear, accessible and integrated across federal government siloes both within the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and across other departments mandated with developing Canada’s Climate policies (i.e. Environment and Climate Change Canada and Natural Resources Canada, among others) and;
• For Canada’s climate mitigation policies to be addressed in a common framework that clearly communicates how these actions contribute to a net-zero carbon future, their benefits and potential impacts.
For more information, see the workshop documents:
Workshop Report (pdf)
